School of Law Students Denounce Professor John Yoo for Aiding Bush's War Crimes

On May 22, 2004, nearly one-quarter of the graduates of UC Berkeley's Boalt School of Law protested the actions of Law Professor John Yoo for issuing a 42-page memorandum in which he explicitly condones the use of torture as means of information retrieval from prisoners of war.¹ Yoo, who once served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice for the Bush administration from 2001 to 2003, was also instrumental in helping draft the USA PATRIOT Act and for is involvement in revising the Military Commissions Act. In his memo, Yoo argues that Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives held US military prisons are “enemy combatants” whose rights are not protected under the Geneva Conventions or any other international laws.² Protesters took to the streets in a 45-person demonstration in June of that year.³ Yoo asserted in a panel discussion that he could find no empirical evidence that anyone's civil liberties were being violated (see note 2).

In continuing to voice frustration with this Yoo's stance, about 15 students in the fall of 2005 performed teach-in protests in front of Boalt Hall. Some students dressed in orange jumpsuits and wore black bags over their heads as symbolic reminders of what atrocities were being committed in prisons such as Abu Ghraib. “Before the protest, a small group of students and group members entered Yoo's law class in Booth Auditorium, dressed as Abu Ghraib torture victims while being led by a man representing a U.S. Soldier.” Two of the students were given seven-day stay away orders from entering Boalt Hall by UCPD officers.⁴ One year later similar demonstrations led by students and faculty occurred outside Boalt Hall.

Despite pressure from students, alumni, faculty, and community members, Yoo has still not revoked is initial position on torture. Most recently however, Berkeley City Council voted to endorse a Center for Constitutional Rights criminal complaint to charge Rumsfeld, Gonzalez, and others (including Yoo) implicated in US war crimes.⁵

The following text is taken from a petition signed by hundreds of students, graduates and alumni of the Boalt Hall School of Law against Prof. John Yoo’s actions during his tenure as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel. In May 2004, about one-quarter of the 270 graduates of the school donned red armbands over their black robes in a silent protest of Yoo’s actions and called on him to resign.

“According to a recent report in Newsweek entitled 'The Roots of Torture,' Prof. Yoo authored a memorandum in January, 2002, advising the Bush Administration that the protections of the Geneva Conventions would not apply to prisoners held by the United States in its execution of the war in Afghanistan. While Secretary of State Colin Powell and lawyers for the State Department vigorously sought to repudiate Prof. Yoo's flawed legal analysis, subsequent actions taken by the Bush Administration and the military demonstrate that our government has taken Prof. Yoo's advice to heart.

We believe that the actions taken by Prof. Yoo contributed directly to the reprehensible violations of human rights recently witnessed in Iraq and elsewhere. By seeking to exploit and magnify any technical ambiguities in the Geneva Conventions and the laws of war, Prof. Yoo and the Bush Administration have created a climate of disdain and hostility towards international law, effectively opening the door to the acts of outright torture, rape and murder that we now know were committed by United States soldiers and civilian interrogators. Such abuses, if not explicitly ordered by the Administration or military commanders, were at the very least a foreseeable consequence of crippling the protections of the Geneva Conventions in the context of the 'War on Terror.'”